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President of the Republic at the Presentation of the Estonian Translation of ''The Black Book of Communism'' on December 12, 2000, at the Tallinn Town Hall
12.12.2000

Ladies and gentlemen, I just apologised to Mr. Courtois that I would be speaking in Estonian; he smiled and said that he would understand my Estonian anyway.

I recalled a meeting in Bonn in 1990, when everything was still ahead, but a lot had already been accomplished, and when I, speaking to an audience about ten times as big as the this one, said that everybody was talking about communism being dead, but no one had actually seen its body. This was my answer to several questions, and I have been glad to see this reply quoted sometimes in the German press and German literature. It has been quoted, and the need to quote it is definitely greater today than it was in 1990. Of course, Estonia has her historical experience. And proceeding from that historical experience, I would like to point today to our duty to consider communism and nazism always together, as two sides of the same coin. Usually it is said that a coin has two different sides. But this is a strange coin, and its sides are not even different.

I will tell you a small story, which has an almost intimate value. Alfred Rosenberg was once a student here, in the city of Tallinn, at the Secondary School of Sciences - and a successful student at that, and a talented watercolour painter. He left Tallinn for Riga, and from Riga, he went on to Kiev; in Kiev, he was fascinated by the uniforms of the Russian Black Hundreds. And only about 12-15 years later, at the time of the Munich coup, after having been sentenced to prison for a short period, he modelled the SS uniform following that example. And only 20 years later, the SS marched into its country of origin, into the city of Kiev. Although it was only for a short time.

You can see that extremist worldviews always support each other, because they are born of the same source, the drive to seize power. The pretext of seizing power is secondary. It is the technical side and the propaganda for seizing power that should interest us much more in the future, because these threats have not disappeared from the world.

I would like to quote some numbers. When the Third Reich was at its most powerful, i.e. at the time when it also included Ostland, there were 16,000 people working in the Gestapo. When the Soviet Union was at its most powerful, there were 1.2 million people working in the NKVD. We can draw all kinds of conclusions from here; for instance, that the German state apparatus was more efficient than the Russian one, which is of course, admittedly true. But this is not what I wish to conclude. I would like to return to the present day.

Today, extremism has more power in the world than it had five or ten years ago. About a week ago, the German Reichstag approved a resolution to ban a party, a rightist extremist party. And I suppose this resolution to confront everything that is hostile towards democracy is a welcome one, but welcome only on the condition that it is directed precisely against extremism. And I am a little perturbed by the fact that we are dividing extremism in two: one of them is called leftism, and the other is called rightism; and then saying that rightism is dangerous, while leftism is not. The historical experience of Estonia can state with iron certainty that these two are not two different sides of the same coin - they are two similar sides of the same coin.

Extremism will also in the future be the greatest enemy of mankind, because it is an enemy of democracy.

When reading this book, let us remember that this is the first generalisation, that this is, as they tell us in NATO, the opening of the door. But it is we who must open the door, and for this, we must work hard. Also in the soviet circumstances people tried to do this kind of work. But inevitably, they could only use memories, because let us remember that in the Soviet time, archives were even better protected than concentration camps and foreign borders of the state.

I am sorry that we still have all this work to do, but I am proud that the preconditions for the work have been created, the materials have been gathered. Our volunteers have published a research on 220 thousand Estonians who were killed, imprisoned, taken to prison camps, deported, or repressed in one way or another. These are the sources that we must proceed from, and which we must dispassionately separate from personal experience in order to reach the philosophers' stone that will let us see that man has just a single hope, and this is the hope of democracy.

And democracy calls for protection. Protection from any kind of extremism, and this is more and more difficult under the circumstances of the modern mass media.

This book has not merely been published in the Estonian language, this book is also an appeal to all of us to proceed with work and to understand that this work is the only presumption of the future of mankind.

Thank you!

 

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